This incisive and smart look at how Gary Hart's run for the White House in 1988 was derailed by press reporting of his infidelities is a double barbed look at the American political system. It is as withering of press ethics as a Trump tweet while showing the start of the degradation of the US Democratic system and how the process of becoming president discourages anybody worthy of the position from applying.

It's a pox on both their houses and Reitman's film is effectively a dual procedural. Traditionally films about politics or the press sought to immerse viewers in the casual cynicism of the process of getting elected or getting a daily paper out, and Front runs with both of them. It opens with a long tracking shot circling around a group of journalists outside the hotel as Hart prepares to concede from the 1984 race. The long opening tracking shot is something associated with De Palma but this one is definitely more in the drifty style of Robert Altman. The whole film is made in an Altman style: a big ensemble cast, overlapping dialogue that it is hard to make out, a concentration on the flow of events rather than the specifics.

Jackman isn't my idea of Hart, he was more Garry Shandling trying to look like Redford, but it's a decent performance. His indignity at having to talk about his private life, at his certainties being taken from him, his refusal to see the way the game was changing, is very powerful. Whatever Hart's failings and however facetious the idea of him being The Next JFK, nobody ever questioned that he was a serious figure. He liked to hang out with Warren Beatty but he also put in the hours, doing the hard graft, working on his policy positions on all the issues. His story is significant because it is seen as the moment when the press started to apply tabloid sensationalism to the political process.

The film is definitely pushing the idea that he was America's great lost leader, which is debatable, but it isn't blind to his flaws and contradictions. It doesn't shy away from how his womanising was a form of abuse and suggests that the flaw of the press is not that they started to scrutinise politicians private lives, but that they didn't do so earlier – Hart is indignant about his treatment because Kennedy and Johnson's serial infidelities in office were overlooked in the sixties.

It may ultimately be a little bit too soft of a movie but it does raise some awkward issues; there is the uneasy recognition that although most of us are invested in the necessity of a free press, that free press is often scum.